We’re trained from a young age to appreciate the combination of images and text. The children’s picture book becomes the 20-something’s online comic or meme, creating a steady flow of static images and clever wordplay that sticks with us our entire lives. Now Quipio, a bootstrapped app developed in France, India, Vietnam, California, and New York, is making it easier to produce these augmented status updates.

The app has been featured by Apple in its Photo & Video section, and Quipio co-founder and Head of Product Zubin Wadia says that the iPhone app has been downloaded over 20,000 times. Users have “Quipped” 5,700 of these augmented status updates, which have been shared 17,600 times. And, for every registered user, Wadia says there are “at least two dark users” who download and use the app without creating an account. Not bad for an app released last week.

It’s hard to explain exactly what a “Quip” is. The updates sit somewhere between a status update, a photo, and a typographic exercise. Despite the difficulty explaining just what the updates are, chances are high that most anyone has seen one somewhere on the Web. At its essence, a Quip is like an Instagram photo with a typographic overlay, or a status update that looks different from the vanilla text seen on Facebook and Twitter.

If you’ve ever visited Tumblr or befriended a teeny-bopper on Facebook you’ve probably seen updates that mix (poor) typography and (unrelated) images to express emotions. As much as we all groan when we see these updates — really, the picture of those two teenagers holding hands wasn’t sad enough without “I’LL NEVVER [sic] LEAVE YOU” plastered over it? — there are a small few that are worth a glance. Quipio makes it easier to create those images.

Wadia says that other “text-on-image” services didn’t facilitate creation because they required too much user input. These services force users “to pick out fonts, sizes, weights, alignments, colors – basically everything BUT the process of lucid expression. It had to be fixed, and I think we’ve taken a significant step towards such a future.”

Quipio takes all of that out of the users’ hands. Users are asked to enter some kind of message, whether it’s a quote, an aphorism, or just a status update, and then “highlight” the most important words. I decided to go with “The only thing required for the Joker to win is for Batman to do nothing,” because Batman. Then I used Quipio’s image search to find the Batman symbol, and Quipio handled the rest. Gimmicky? You bet. Fun, even if it’s just to see how well the app works? Absolutely.

That’s likely Quipio’s greatest asset. Creating a Quip is fast and easy, and allows anyone who wants to pretend that they know what “kerning” and “typefaces” or “design” to make something that looks decent without requiring a lot of effort. Tweens will probably use the service to create the same overly emotional and (frankly) douche-y images as before, but everyone else can use Quipio to have a little bit of fun. And to honor the Dark Knight.

Booker, which helps service businesses better engage with customers online, has raised $35 million in a Series C round led by Medina Capital, with participation from strategic investor First Data, Jump Capital, and Signal Peak Ventures, as well as existing investors. The New York City company now sees 3 million appointments booked monthly across 73 countries in 11 languages on its platform. [via Booker]

PCH, a company which “helps entrepreneurs turn ideas into brands and makes a variety of consumer tech products for major companies such as Apple,” has acquired Fab for a reported $15 million in cash and stock. Fab previously had a $1 billion valuation and raised $325 million. It will “continue to focus on design” at PCH. [Source: Bloomberg]

BlackBerry has unveiled several new smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, including the touchscreen-focused BlackBerry Leap and a device with a “dual curve slider,” in addition to its keyboard-equipped products. [Source: New York Times]

March 3, 2015

“I hope to have a bigger presence in the tech world. I love coming up with different app ideas, and I have a few more that are coming out. Once you get started and you have this creative bug of ideas that you want to get out, I feel like I’ve partnered with the right team, and now I have the creative outlet to make that happen. I’m happy that people are into it and perceiving it well. I just want to create more apps.”

PayPal is planning to acquire Paydiant, the company behind CurrentC — retailers’ answer to Apple Pay — for a reported $280 million. No word yet on how the companies will mix, nor if Paydiant’s relationship with the industry group behind CurrentC will remain intact. [Source: Re/code]

Microsoft is in talks to acquire Prismatic, a news aggregation service that uses natural language processing to recommend content in which its users might be interested, according to a report from TechCrunch. Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are all said to have expressed similar interest in the company. (Which is surely a sign of actual interest and not at all an attempt by someone at the company to make it seem like a hot commodity — right?) [Source: TechCrunch]

March 2, 2015

“Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products! It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.”